https://ift.tt/jnwGeDz after British American writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed in New York on August 12, a decades-old fatwa given by the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, became the buzzword as the prima facie cause for the attack.
The 24-year-old attacker has not cited the fatwa as his motive for the stabbing, only that he did not like Rushdie and perceived The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s controversial book, of which he reportedly had read only a few pages, as insulting Islam.
Despite several statements by Iranian officials, including a 1998 statement by former President Mohammad Khatami that the Islamic Republic was not supporting Khomeini’s fatwa to kill Rushdie, it is still believed to be in force, primarily because of the influence of the man who issued it.
“Khomeini’s fatwa carries immense potency because he’s not only followed but revered by the global Shia community,” Khaled Beydoun, a law professor at Wayne State University, told VOA.
A fatwa can be the opinion of a mufti, or scholar of Islamic laws, like Khomeini, or an official pronouncement by an Islamic institution.
“A fatwa can be about a simple personal matter such as missing a prayer, or it could be about a controversial issue such as embryo cloning or transgender operation,” said Jonathan Brown, a professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University.
The enforcement of a fatwa depends largely on who the mufti is, rather than what its contents are.
There are also other limitations.